Recently, Apple launched Apple New+ service which offers the magazine subscriptions to the users and top news publishers. The subscription is not free, users were required to pay a price of $9.99 per month for US and Canada. However, as per the MSpoweruser, the magazine subscription can be subscribed free of cost. The Company hasn’t made it available for free, instead, this is possible because of the flaw in the service. It seems that the company has launched the service without testing it properly.
This flaw was discovered by the developer Steve Troughton-Smith. He observed the way this service works on MacBooks and iMacs. He also shared the results on his twitter handle.
He found that the Apple News+ magazines are not using the company’s FairPlay technology, that offers digital rights management (DRM) tools. The tools are used by Apple to protect the copyrighted audios on its iTunes store. The iOS version limits the tweaks, however, the desktop version is quite different.
Accordingly, the News+ app preloads the magazine pages. These pages are in PDFs. As it preloads, it stores the pages in a cache folder of MacOS. In these folder, these pages can be accessed and can be reconstructed into the original PDFs. This is valid only for the first few pages of the magazine. Smith also observed that the service News+ is able to download the list of the all pages of the issue with their unique address. These urls are hosted publicly and thus, can be accessed if anyone has the specific URL.